Charlie chaplin a political biography from victoorian britain

Charlie Chaplin Richard Carr’s Charlie Chaplin places politics at the centre of the fi lmmaker’s life as it looks beyond Chaplin’s role as a comedic fi gure to his constant political en

Charlie Chaplin

Richard Carr’s Charlie Chaplin places politics at the centre of the

fi lmmaker’s life as it looks beyond Chaplin’s role as a comedic

fi gure to his constant political engagement both on and off the screen

Drawing from a wealth of archival sources from across the globe, Carr provides an in-depth examination of Chaplin’s life as

he made his way from Lambeth to Los Angeles From his ences in the workhouse to his controversial romantic relationships and his connections with some of the leading political fi gures of his day, this book sheds new light on Chaplin’s private life and introduces him as a key social commentator of the time

experi-Whether interested in Hollywood and Hitler or communism

and celebrity, Charlie Chaplin is essential reading for all students

of twentieth-century history

Richard Carr is a Senior Lecturer in History and Politics at Anglia

Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK His previous publications

include Veteran MPs and Conservative Politics in the Aftermath

of the Great War: The Memory of All That (2013) He has also co-authored the books Alice in Westminster: The Political Life of Alice Bacon (2016) and The Global 1920s (2016).

Series Editor: Robert Pearce

Routledge Historical Biographies provide engaging, readable and

aca-demically credible biographies written from an explicitly historical spective These concise and accessible accounts will bring important historical fi gures to life for students and general readers alike.

per-In the same series:

Bismarck by Edgar Feuchtwanger (second edition)

Calvin by Michael A Mullett

Oliver Cromwell by Martyn Bennett

Edward IV by Hannes Kleineke

Elizabeth I by Judith M Richards

Emmeline Pankhurst by Paula Bartley

Franco by Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez

Gladstone by Michael Partridge

Henry V by John Matusiak

Henry VI by David Grummitt

Henry VII by Sean Cunningham

Henry VIII by Lucy Wooding (second edition 2015)

Hitler by Michael Lynch

John F Kennedy by Peter J Ling

John Maynard Keynes by Vincent Barnett

Lenin by Christopher Read

Louis XIV by Richard Wilkinson

Mao by Michael Lynch

Martin Luther by Michael A Mullet (second edition 2014)

Martin Luther King Jr by Peter J Ling (second edition 2015)

Marx by Vincent Barnett

Mary Queen of Scots by Retha M Warnicke

Mary Tudor by Judith M Richards

Mussolini by Peter Neville (second edition 2014)

Nehru by Benjamin Zachariah

Neville Chamberlain by Nick Smart

Oliver Cromwell by Martyn Bennett

Queen Victoria by Paula Bartley

Richard III by David Hipshon

Thatcher by Graham Goodlad

Trotsky by Ian Thatcher

Forthcoming:

Churchill by Robert Pearce

Cranmer by Susan Wabuda

Gandhi by Benjamin Zachariah

Khrushchev by Alexander Titov

Stalin by Christopher Read

Wolsey by Glenn Richardson

Charlie Chaplin

A Political Biography from Victorian Britain to Modern America

Richard Carr

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,

an informa business

© 2017 Richard Carr

The right of Richard Carr to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted

or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks

or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carr, Richard, 1985– author.

Title: Charlie Chaplin : a political biography from Victorian Britain

to modern America.

Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon : New York, NY : Routledge, 2017 | Series: Routledge historical biographies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifi ers: LCCN 2016048529 | ISBN 9781138923256 (hardback : alk paper) | ISBN 9781138923263 (pbk : alk paper) |

ISBN 9781315201672 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Chaplin, Charlie, 1889–1977 | Chaplin, Charlie, 1889–1977—Political and social views | Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography.

List of fi gures viii

Chaplin’s Dickensian period 23

Hanwell and the workhouse 26

Boer War 35

The state Charlie was in 38

Charlie fi nds his career, and his country 43

Karno and Kelly 45

First sights of America 49

2 To shoulder arms? Charlie and the First

3 Moscow or Manchester? Chaplin’s views on

capitalism before the Depression took hold 86

Max Eastman, Rob Wagner and Chaplin’s early

political development 88

Charlie the anarchist 93

Charlie the mogul 95

Chaplin and his money 100

Taking him seriously 104

4 Sex, morality and a tramp in 1920s America 110

Chaplin’s women 111

Censorship and the movies 122

‘Respectable’ Hollywood 127

5 Between Churchill and Gandhi: A comedian

Eisenstein in Hollywood 133

The talkies 137

City Lights 139

Back to Britain 143

The German question 147

Chaplin and Empire 150

Homeward bound 152

6 Modern Times and the Great Depression 156

The Depression and Charlie 157

Social Credit 158

Upton Sinclair and taking a political stand 161

The making of Modern Times 166

The Napoleonic diversion 171

Charlie and two fascists 179

Before The Great Dictator 183

Contents vii The Bercovici case 188

Putting America fi rst 191

Censoring The Great Dictator 194

Content and release 198

The House Un-American Activities Committee 211

Backing the Red Army 218

Joan Barry and the Cockney cad 222

Monsieur Verdoux 227

The pressure intensifi es 233

The Tramp leaves America 244

Charlie and the Cold War 250

Later plaudits and a fi nal reconciliation

1.1 Winston Churchill’s article analysing

Chaplin’s life, mid-1930s 162.1 A mascot of Charlie Chaplin made by British

5.1 Charlie pictured with Winston Churchill

6.1 Chaplin pictured at his studio with Upton

Sinclair and Governor James Vardaman 162

7.1 On the set of 1940’s The Great Dictator 1999.1 Charlie and Oona Chaplin take in 1950s London 251

Figures

2.1 Most successful fi lms released 1918– 31,

and the age of marriage of their star 817.1 Instances of ‘propaganda’ as defi ned by the

Production Code Administration, June 1938 193

Tables

This project has almost been as global as Chaplin’s life Along the way its author has racked up innumerable debts My employ-ers at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) have been generous with research funding as and where appropriate Alison Ainley has been a model of support and kindness at the top of the Humani-ties and Sciences tree at ARU Teaching history and politics along-side Lucy Bland, Jon Davis, Sean Lang, Rohan McWilliam, Luke Cooper and Susan Flavin remains a pleasure I’ve leant on the historical expertise of the fi rst four to read through chapters of this work, and particular gratitude is due for that My apologies

to all students who have had to suffer my crowbarring Chaplin into every subject under the Sun I should say I’ll stop, but I won’t.Many archivists have helped along the way with this project, and the following is a no doubt massively incomplete list Nev-ertheless, Bill Davis at the National Archives, Washington, D.C., answered a rather hasty request for access to HUAC materials incredibly swiftly Allen Packwood and Katharine Thomson at

my old stomping ground of the Churchill Archives Centre (CAC), Cambridge, UK have been as helpful as ever Jennifer Hadley at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut went above and beyond in chasing down an obscure Social Credit link Martin Gibbs was very welcoming in allowing this historian to wade through the Strachey papers To all who digitised material that appears in this book’s archival bibliography – many thanks indeed Permissions to utilise the various photographs that appear here are also gratefully received

Acknowledgements

Although all errors, opinions and anything else remain

my responsibility alone, this work has been vastly improved through the help of others Audiences in Cambridge and Bol-ogna who have heard my various papers and presentations

on all things Chaplin have no doubt helped sharpen some of the arguments that appear here Lord Robert Armstrong is thanked in the bibliography for his recollections on the issue

of Charlie’s knighthood, but a further such acknowledgement

is deserved here At Routledge, I must thank Catherine Aitken, Bob Pearce and Laura Pilsworth for being unstintingly help-ful in the production process for this book The anonymous reviewers for the initial proposal doubtless whipped some of the more nonsensical claims into shape, as did the reviewer of the manuscript itself I should also acknowledge the comments

of Professor Steven J Ross who, in an earlier version of the proposal for this book, pointed the author in some very fruitful directions In terms of other US folks, I first discussed a Chap-lin book with David Singerman in a Pepperpot at Churchill College, the University of Cambridge, more than a decade ago,

so his views on this manuscript are both gratefully received and only appropriate Another ex-Churchillian Bradley Hart

is at least owed a further pint at Little Woodrow’s, Houston for reading through this manuscript and offering valuable sug-gestions Our watching huge American flags fly over car lots with pro-Donald Trump shock jocks on the radio while on the drive to Liberty, Texas was certainly an eye opener Equally, Dominic Rustecki and Tom Shakespeare (DPR) offered use-ful thoughts on Chaplin’s private life and his South London background, too

I should fi nally thank those who have lived with this project as it has evolved over the years The two felines have been lovely com-pany during the writing process Larry: most cats don’t bring in

rabbits, take note Molly: well done for recognising that To mum: thanks for all the support (and Chaplin gifts) over the years But,

as ever, I am most grateful to Sarah I may have been working for the past four years on a historical fi gure who was often a night-mare of a husband, but I am very lucky indeed to have married such a wonderful wife All my love, as ever

CC travels around the UK, seeing poverty throughout the land

T Essanay ($1,250 per week)

Britain enters the First W Wa

Signs with Mutual Film Corp ($10,000 per week)

to criticise the notion of America as ‘the land of the free’; CC faces charges of ‘shirking’ military service by right-wing British press

Russian revolution; the US enters the First W

Marries Mildred Harris; their son (Norman Spencer) dies after three days (1919)

CC takes active part in Liberty Bond drives for British and American governments;

backing the war effort; CC fi rst meets Upton Sinclair

Allied victory in the First World W

United Artists launched by CC, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and others

CC hears Max Eastman speak on the subject of ‘Hands Off Russia’

numerous allusions to his own impoverished childhood

CC praises Henry Ford; returns to Europe to promote

CC against; start of FBI surveillance against CC

Benito Mussolini becomes Italian Prime Minister

marries Lita Grey in Mexico (two sons born, 1925/6); works on

German Reichstag deputies, Einstein and more

Extensive political chronology in Chapter 5; includes praise for Mussolini’

take shape; Alistair Cooke brought in to help with the script (removed from this role, 1934)

CC gives radio address in support of FDR

Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany; Roosevelt inaugurated as US President

‘struggle against capitalism’; English leftist John Strachey drafts a script for an unused Napoleon fi

Britain and France declare war on Nazi Germany

which will later lead to two court cases over the Mann Act and a paternity suit (both 1944)

CC gives several speeches endorsing the Soviet war effort and demanding the Western democracies launch a ‘second front’ against Hitler The murder of European Jewry through the Holocaust is sped up after the German invasion of the Soviet Union (1941)

‘respectable’ end of American cinema industry from the ‘Hollywood T

which mocks the McCarthyite mood that had gripped America

Meets Nikita Khrushchev and Nehru; awarded International Peace Prize by the W

Introduction: A very political life

To cut a long story short, we need to view Charlie Chaplin’s undeniably famous fi lms as a component piece in a much more complex puzzle: Chaplin’s real-life politics and what others made

of them In essence, the following thereby invites the reader to take a cinematic comedian seriously almost the entire time – no small feat Yet the politics-centred approach outlined in this book merely serves to restore the creator of the Little Tramp to the way that many saw him during his lifetime Indeed, comments along these lines were frequent For his dining companion and sometime host Winston Churchill, ‘the real Chaplin, as revealed

to those who, like myself, have had the pleasure of meeting him

in private life, is by no means funny He is a man of character and culture.’1 For another confi dant, the 1934 left-wing Democratic Candidate for Governor of California Upton Sinclair, Chaplin’s work – especially those fi lms with ‘undercurrent[s] of tragedy’ –

gave ‘tremendous meaning to everything we are witnessing’ and

‘will earn you the gratitude of millions of people whom you have never seen’.2 Fundamentally, therefore, Chaplin was never viewed

as just a clown, but as a social commentator whose views could be

dangerous or inspirational depending on one’s own political ing He was, as his great biographer David Robinson describes,

lean-The Mirror of Opinion.3

Partly due to Chaplin’s own impoverished background in Victorian South London, his later fi lmic commentary often meant supporting the dispossessed His most famous creation

of course was a tramp: ‘a bum with a bum’s philosophy’ to

quote his friend and sometime rival Buster Keaton.4 Indeed, the

very notion that the cane-twirling vagabond had any kind of

‘philosophy’ speaks to the near endless contemporary tion on what experience or moment in Chaplin’s early life had driven its creation As no less a luminary than Sigmund Freud pointed out, Chaplin ‘cannot get away from those [childhood] impressions and to this day he obtains for himself the compen-sation for the frustrations and humiliations of that past period

specula-of his life’.5 But the point was that Chaplin was about more than the tramp, and his artistic creations were generally viewed

as symptomatic of a far more serious agenda By way of brief

illustration, according to one British Foreign Offi ce dum in the late 1930s, Charlie’s ‘racial and social sympathies are with those groups and classes which have suffered most’.6 Unlike some of the political aspersions cast on Chaplin, this Whitehall verdict was no doubt true – and indeed more or less summed

memoran-up the plots of The Great Dictator (1940) and Modern Times

(1936), respectively Yet whatever the veracity of its content, such a document is arguably odd in that it exists at all The very fact that British diplomats were exchanging a fl urry of corre-spondence over Chaplin in the fateful summer of 1939 suggests that this is someone whose politics could do with further review That is the purpose of this book

To view Chaplin in this new light, this work draws on a whole host of under-utilised archival sources Chaplin lived a global life and has thus left behind an internationally scattered collec-tion of material that numerous accounts of his work have over-looked.7 This study corrects that imbalance Since Chaplin was

a British subject his whole life, the Foreign Offi ce and Security Service material held at the National Archives at Kew, London provides valuable insights into the way those in the corridors

of power of his homeland treated him Likewise, key British archival collections, such as those of Winston Churchill (held

in Cambridge), Oswald and Cynthia Mosley (Birmingham), the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (Oxford) and the Astors (Reading) offer material related to Chaplin’s political thoughts at various points, as well as just helping to pinpoint his movements The British side of Chaplin’s archival trail has arguably been particularly overlooked, perhaps under-standably, by an American-centric approach to his life to date

Introduction: A very political life 3

To be fair, living as he did in America from 1914 until 1952,

a plethora of archives across the continental United States also help highlight the recollections of Chaplin insiders, such as Harry Crocker (Los Angeles, CA) and Upton Sinclair (Bloomington, IN),

as well as the outpourings of direct opponents like Martin Dies (Liberty, TX) These are utilised here Above and beyond these accounts, the American establishment’s views on Chaplin will be outlined through material held not only by various Presidential Libraries, but also by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Library of Congress and National Archives (all Washington, D.C.) And, fi nally, there is the ‘Chaplin trail’ of material run-ning from the offi ce of his estate in Paris to the reams of newspa-per material in Montreux, Switzerland (near his fi nal residence)

to the digitised Chaplin archive currently held in Bologna, Italy

In utilising British, continental European and American archival leads (and more), this study is able to connect political dots that other studies have overlooked In doing so, it arguably forms a more overtly political companion text to Chuck Maland’s won-

derful work on Chaplin’s Star Image and the cult of celebrity that

followed him.8

And yet for all the new combination of sources presented here,

it would be disingenuous to claim that this is the fi rst work to discuss Chaplin’s politics Filmic accounts, including Walter Kerr’s

The Silent Clowns, contain the odd fl ash of political insight, as does Kyp Harness’s work on The Art of Charlie Chaplin.9 The notion of the Little Tramp as a working-class hero bravely resist-ing the forces of capitalism has been touched on by Eric L Flom’s survey of Chaplin’s talkies, while the literature on Hollywood’s collaboration with Nazi Germany has swelled over the last decade – with accounts by Thomas Doherty and Ben Urwand igniting a controversial debate that has obvious ramifi cations for a biogra-

phy of the creator of The Great Dictator, Adenoid Hynkel.10 On

a wider scale, Steven J Ross’s accounts of Working Class lywood and Hollywood Left and Right deserve all the praise they

Hol-have received for their intertwining of Hollywood and American politics, and the latter includes an insightful chapter on Chap-lin.11 Moreover, Owen Hatherley has recently explored the con-nections between Chaplin and the USSR to much acclaim, and Libby Murphy has provided an important and rigorous discussion

of Chaplin’s reception in France, too.12 No book is an island, and this work undeniably builds on a substantial body of work The British end could do with some buttressing, but there is little doubt that Chaplin has been a well-studied fi gure.13

For all that, two gaps in the literature emerge The above works notwithstanding, many accounts of the politics of fi lm still under-play both the relatively developed nature of Chaplin’s ideology and his overall place in the story In Larry Ceplair and Steven

Englund’s studious 1983 work on The Inquisition in Hollywood

Chaplin is an incidental character mostly reduced to the margins

of a broader red-baiting story.14 More recently, Urwand’s study of

the late 1930s alludes to The Great Dictator but, given its remit,

naturally extends beyond the Tramp, treating the issue as an sodic debate about Hollywood, rather than exploring its rami-

epi-fi cations for Chaplin the man.15 Chaplin is thus parcelled off as one of Hollywood’s nobler lights In this specifi c context, this was

no doubt true, but things were neither so completely black and white when it came to fascism for Charlie, nor was offi cialdom completely out of line for being suspicious of him If academics and commentators have paid attention to, for example, Benjamin Disraeli’s literary career or the extra-political writings of a Boris Johnson or a Winston Churchill, then the process deserves to be run in reverse Culture can bleed into politics, but the opposite is also true

Second, there is also a tendency among fi lm scholars, standably enough, to prioritise interpreting possible political

under-‘meanings’ of Chaplin’s cinematic output at the expense of looking

at the people he was defi nitely meeting and the things he was ally saying This account is not a shot-by-shot reading of Charlie’s

actu-fi lms It would be difactu-fi cult to write a biography of the man without mentioning his fi lms at all, but in large part they are not the focus here Instead, this book restores Chaplin to what he was for many – a political operator turned lobbyist who happened to be

in the business of making world-class cinema The volume of FBI

fi les on Chaplin, for example, were almost exclusively concerned with Charlie Chaplin the living, breathing man and the supposed

‘radicals’ he was associating with – not the meanderings of the Little Tramp or if and when Charlie should move from making silent cinema to the talkies J Edgar Hoover had other, and, for

Introduction: A very political life 5

him, more important interests There is a strong literature on such cinematic topics, and other accounts do it better than here Instead, this study rather borrows from political science theory and the work of scholars such as John Street For Street, the very

notion of a celebrity politician can and must be cut two ways

While scholars have written much on what Street calls ‘Celebrity Politician (CP) 1’ – elected legislators such as Tony Blair, Barack Obama or Justin Trudeau who use the cult of celebrity to aid their room for political manoeuvre – less attention has been given to ‘CP 2’ – ‘the entertainer who pronounces on politics and claims the right to represent peoples and causes’.16 Partially as a by-product

of celebrity activists such as Russell Brand, George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, and the politicalisation of comedy (including Jon Stewart, John Oliver and Matt Forde), the scholarly CP1– CP2 gap has narrowed of late, but a study that explicitly addresses this with reference to Chaplin has much to add

There are specifi c areas of advocacy that can be expanded upon

For example, Kenneth Lynn’s Chaplin and His Times allows just

over a page for discussion of Chaplin’s decision not to enlist in the British or American armies during the Great War.17 David Robinson discusses his belief in the related causes of Social Credit and a ver-

sion of quantitative easing at a similar length in his classic lin: His Life and Art.18 More recently, Peter Ackroyd gets through his entire trenchant biography without mentioning Henry Ford, Oswald Mosley or John Strachey at all.19 That is not necessarily

Chap-a criticism – they Chap-are different types of books to this But it does suggest that a monograph-length consideration of Chaplin’s politics may have something to bring to the table At just over 100,000 words this work constitutes less than half the size of either Robin-son’s magisterial tome or Lynn’s incisive analysis, and the trade-offs with regard to comprehensiveness versus a punchy account are read-ily acknowledged There will be more work for scholars to do on his politics in years to come, but this book can certainly help nudge that debate on

Throughout, we will not adopt a universally linear structure but rather jump back and forth between periods of time Our goal is

to draw out different themes of Chaplin’s life, not chronicle his every waking moment Through nine main chapters the goal of this book is to tease out aspects of the political Chaplin, and this

can be best done through a thematic approach To begin with then, while his impoverished origins provided much of the inspiration for the feel, look and motivations of his Little Tramp character they also, as Chapter 1 makes clear, imbued within him an initial antipathy to the idea of the state as a force for good Partly due

to timing and the broader political climate in which he grew up, these early years also meant that Chaplin’s politics were always rather idiosyncratic, and not easily reduced to one particular label Although he was never a communist, he cannot always be completely pigeon-holed as, for instance, an interventionist Euro-pean social-democrat either In many ways Charlie would fl ip-fl op between positions – not unlike many a politician in his or any other day But this does not diminish his political seriousness If Britain’s Ramsay MacDonald could move from the Labour Party’s fi rst ever Prime Minister to leading a de facto Conservative administration

in a matter of weeks in the autumn of 1931, we perhaps should not be too harsh if Charlie occasionally jumped from socialist to anarchist sympathies

The First World War shook Charlie’s political kaleidoscope some more, as it did so many Here, as our second chapter makes clear, the fact that he did not perform active military service during the defi ning moment of his generation would bring a whole series

of political consequences for the man in the coming years Equally, the fact that this period saw him make a staggering amount of money on the one hand and marry his fi rst ‘child bride’ on the other set up two further sources of opprobrium for any would-be political opponents In not fi ghting from 1914 to 1918, Charlie would thereby pave the way for several fi ghts that would dog his career for decades to come As Republican Senator Harry Cain put it in 1949, ‘Chaplin has sat out in luxurious comfort in two wars in which his native Britain and his hospitable United States were involved, in the defense of those freedoms which he perverts

so glibly.’20 This would be a continual refrain from those who opposed his progressive politics

Once Allied victory in the war had been secured, however, lin considered the type of world he wished to build Chapter 4 will make clear how his political reach was already coming under

Chap-fi re due to his controversial relationships with several very young women, but, prior to it, the third chapter shows he was having his

Introduction: A very political life 7

world view shaped by interactions with several left-wing thinkers – not least the radical pamphleteer Max Eastman and Chaplin’s own employee, Rob Wagner Together with Upton Sinclair, these fi gures shaped Chaplin’s vague sympathies for the American (and British) working man into a more positive line on the recent communist takeover in Russia Indeed, according to a letter from the US Department of Justice to J Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, by

1922 Chaplin stood as ‘an active part of the Red movement in this country’.21 Except it was a good deal more complicated than the anti-Chaplin forces in D.C would have it At the same time that Charlie was breaking bread with those praising Vladimir Lenin or, over a cold beer, trying to convince Buster Keaton that commu-nism was the future, he was one of the most successful capitalists

of his era, and praised other such innovators – most starkly Henry Ford – to the hilt After all, ultimately, he would form United Art-

ists to make money, not to constitute the cinematic wing of The Daily Worker If in the 1920s the ‘business of America was busi-

ness’ – to paraphrase Republican President Calvin Coolidge – than Charlie was not averse to taking advantage of this atmosphere Precisely because he had grown up with so little money, Charlie

was always more about his own capital than he was Das Kapital.

We then turn to what Chaplin did in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 In Chapter 5 we look not only at Chap-lin’s world tour of 1931– 2 but how it served important politi-

cal purposes above and beyond promoting the majesty of City Lights Touring through a Britain on the verge of seeing its Labour

government fall from offi ce unable to address the slump, an Italy seemingly revitalised under Mussolini and a Berlin soon to fall to Nazi takeover, Chaplin would not only be a satirist of the major events of the 1930s, but a key witness to them Along the way he would not only avariciously read economy theorists from John Maynard Keynes to C.H Douglas, but he sat down and wrote his own concrete schemes to address the world’s ills Chapter 6 then shows how he brought these political ideas home Looking at the

road to what became Modern Times, we chart Charlie’s support

for Roosevelt’s New Deal, as well as the Upton Sinclair inspired

‘E.P.I.C.’ programme that sat well to the left of a very

intervention-ist White House His political activities would certainly extend to

the big screen, but this was simply the tip of the iceberg

The fi nal three chapters then look at Chaplin on the world

stage Beginning with The Great Dictator in Chapter 7, we

explore Charlie’s complicated and changing relationship to cism Given his early hatred of state power (a position he would

fas-return to in the 1940s) and the hard evidence of The Great tator, it is understandable why Charlie should have been judged

Dic-as a total and unwavering anti-fDic-ascist Rather like Churchill, he ended up on the right side of history by 1939– 40, and all else is forgotten And, certainly, the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitism was always completely anathema to him, partially due to familial and romantic connections Yet there are two factors we also need to build into this picture – factors that do not override this ingrained perception, but should nuance it somewhat On the one hand, once he decided to make the picture, Charlie faced down signifi cant pressure from major governments and his own industry to stop production It was a brave move to resist it, not least commercially This remains to his eternal credit Yet,

equally, before he decided to make The Great Dictator, the man

who would go on to play Adenoid Hynkel was not without a kind word for elements of the Italian fascist regime, or indeed other fascists such as Oswald Mosley In many ways this chapter therefore desanctifi es the way that Chaplin is viewed vis-à-vis fascism, but makes him all the more human (and arguably, there-fore, all the more impressive)

Having taken on Hitler, Chapter 8 then deals with how Charlie viewed Stalin and the Red Army, and how this stance was received

in America As we will see, words designed to encourage America and Britain’s ally the Soviet Union in 1942 would go on to become Exhibit A for those who wanted to rid the country of an allegedly

‘ un-American’ actor This chapter therefore considers how lin’s sex life and his politics intertwined once more It details how this ‘cockney cad’ – a double insult, taking in both his refusal to become an American citizen on the one hand and his nefarious activities in the bedroom on the other – faced a trial under the Mann Act (for sexual impropriety) before being hit by the terms

Chap-of the McCarran Act (for alleged communist sympathy) six years later Chapter 9 ends our story on Charlie’s years in Swiss exile, his fi nal political views, as well as an eventual reconciliation – of sorts – with America

Introduction: A very political life 9

Before beginning, it must be said that many limitations dog any analysis of Chaplin The fi rst is that for much of his early life there

is scant contemporary source for either his whereabouts or his opinions Much is retrospectively claimed about his Dickensian childhood – including here – but pinpointing where he even was at various points remains a diffi culty David Robinson commendably includes a chronology of Chaplin’s known addresses in the appen-

dix of his Life and Art but there remain gaps in Charlie’s backstory

that inevitably involve a degree of supposition on behalf of any biographer This is exacerbated by Chaplin’s own half-truth and bare-faced lies during interviews in the early years of his career Such chicanery was partly designed to lend himself greater intrigue, but was no doubt also a product of mere boredom at the regular-ity of such promotional fl uff Even Chaplin himself spun versions

of, for example, the death of his father and his fi rst appearance

on stage His birth is likewise shrouded in mystery Although later taken in anti-Semitic directions by political opponents in Germany, America and beyond, the confusion as to where Charlie entered the world in part arose from Chaplin’s own reluctance to pin down

a location Given the more recent furore over the birthplace of the forty-fourth President of the United States Barack Obama, having the political right jump on such issues is a notion hardly limited

to Chaplin’s time But at least Obama was able to eventually, and understandably grudgingly, produce a birth certifi cate No such document existed for Charlie We must rely heavily on his auto-biography, and given it was written in Chaplin’s early seventies, this brings its own issues of memory and reinvention

In any event, the adult Charlie was also an utter hypocrite at times As his friend Harry Crocker noted, ‘In this world there were to be two sets of laws: those which controlled all other men, and those with concern to Chaplin.’22 Therefore, what Charlie said – for example, urging politicians to help the poor – was often

at odds with what he did (in this instance, avoiding paying the taxes to fund the social programmes that could do just that) Yet this in a sense again humanises the man Charlie the liberal politi-cal saint who was persecuted by the American right and yet still

had the bravery to make The Great Dictator is a construction

not without foundation, but does not tell the whole story The man was complex, and his opponents’ claims against him may

have been caricatures, but they were often broadly true Charlie was a nightmare to be married to and a person with questionable sexual ethics across the board; thus, those who had a beef with his morality were more or less kicking against an open door To con-demn offi cialdom as unthinking and unfeeling while being a mil-lionaire sleeping with fi fteen-year-old girls was not a particularly tenable pose Today, he would have been issuing press-gagging injunctions on a weekly basis Unpicking the world of claim and counter-claim about Chaplin is therefore not easy and, certainly, mud was slung both at him and from him But in documenting his views ‘warts and all’, we may at least understand where he was trying to get to, and how worried his political opponents need have been.

Third, on something of a technical note, we must also concede that our task is made more diffi cult by the fact that Charlie never voted in any election for a British Member of Parliament or an American President We deal with why this was so in our fi rst chapter – in essence it boiled down to ineligibility rather than abstention But it meant that Charlie never had to assume any degree of personal responsibility for his political views until the tide of public opinion began to turn against him He was not grounded in democracy per se and was not aligned to any party (much as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) would try to pin communist affi liation on him) On the one hand, this must have made his life easier – he could hobnob with the Churchills and the Viscount Astors while being able to jovially parry away any uncomfortable discussions with jokes about not being able to vote or vagaries about being a ‘citizen of the world’ But it also meant that he would never assume much of a tribal identity, either in Britain or America This gave him the freedom to say what he wanted, but it also meant that when the heat was on, people whom he had previously enjoyed convivial discussions with could slink back into the mist and leave the lecherous Englishman

to take the heat of a morally righteous America

A fi nal comment must be added Fundamentally, Charlie was

a man of power Although estimates of cinema audiences in a non-digital age are by nature ballpark, even on a very conserva-tive reading we can say that up to ten million Americans saw

the class divide of 1931’s City Lights, perhaps twelve and a half

Introduction: A very political life 11 million 1921’s autobiographical The Kid and more than twenty million witnessed the pathos and snow of The Gold Rush.23 In

an America with a population of about 116 million in 1925 these were signifi cant numbers It is highly likely therefore that more people saw Charlie perform the famous roll dance of 1925 than voted for any Republican Presidential Candidate up to Dwight D Eisenhower in 1952 For politicians seeking to tap into the newly democratised masses, fi lm had a particular utility and potentially

a very strong effect – positive or negative Charlie himself would famously lampoon this through the ludicrously stage-managed

theatrics seen in Hynkel’s Germany of The Great Dictator But

as millions of Americans took to the cinemas to stare at screens for hours a week, what was projected on them began to take on greater and greater signifi cance Figures like Chaplin had the potential to assume a Weberian charismatic authority that could sway the masses for or against a particular political position, and were readily seen in this light

Academically, this notion of fi lm as a political and cal weapon was outlined most famously by Theodor Adorno and

ideologi-Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment of the early

1940s There the two Frankfurt School theorists wrote of a ture industry’ that was providing ‘mass deception’ to the masses Rather than being served an enlightening and wholesome diet of progressive cinema, audiences were being fed bland gruel In this view, although fi lms may differ in terms of their individual plot, the overall message would always remain the same As Hork-heimer and Adorno wrote in 1944, ‘What [movie] connoisseurs discuss as good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the sem-blance of competition and range of choice [between] Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions.’24 On the one hand, this could result in some pretty turgid structuring Today’s audiences bored of Judd Apatow ‘Bromances’ or Jason Statham

‘cul-fi ring a gun at some bad guys may well recognise the contention that ‘no independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided’.25 But the prob-lem was deeper than just a boring product For Horkheimer and Adorno the overall consequence of all cinema, up to and including

‘Donald Duck in the cartoons’, was that ‘the unfortunate in real

life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment’.26 The seeming ‘choice’ of Warner Brothers ver-sus MGM was really just one form of conformity versus another The massifi cation of fi lm after its anarchic early days (more on this

in Chapter 2) had produced a politically anodyne Hollywood: ‘In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is fi nally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world [people] sought to escape.’27

Chaplin himself was referenced in this regard by Horkheimer and Adorno Having condemned movie writers for seeking to ensure that ‘developments must follow from the immediately preceding situation’ (and ‘never from the idea of the whole’), the pair lambasted the ‘tendency mischievously to fall back on pure nonsense right up to Chaplin and the Marx Brothers’.28 The tramp kicking a policeman on the backside was not a political act, or at least an insuffi cient one Yet, despite such scepticism, it must be acknowledged the Frankfurt School was not a uniform set of principles While Horkheimer and Adorno cast a pessimis-tic eye on the movie industry, Frankfurt theorists such as Walter Benjamin could view fi lm’s potential much more positively In his seminal essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Pro-duction’, Benjamin noted that ‘so long as the movie-makers’ cap-ital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s fi lm than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art’ So far, so Frankfurt Yet there was an important caveat For one, Benjamin placed greater emphasis than his contemporaries on the fact that ‘today’s fi lms can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property’ Certainly, this was the case with Chaplin, whose audience, Benjamin believed, experienced

a ‘progressive reaction characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation

of the expert’ This idea that fi lm, unlike books, could cultivate

an expert’s mentality among the masses was an important one For Benjamin, ‘it is inherent in the technique of the fi lm as well

as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its ments is somewhat of an expert’ Unlike literature, therefore – where ‘for centuries a small number of writers were confronted

accomplish-by many thousands of readers’ – fi lm was a medium that the

Introduction: A very political life 13

audience could not just passively and obediently consume, but that they could understand, critique and potentially help shape the future of themselves Indeed, writing in the 1930s Benjamin was able to conclude that ‘transitions that in literature took cen-turies have come about in a decade’ Contemporary fi lm may indeed have been Donald Duck taking his beating at the time, but there was no historical inevitability about this Processing the images of fi lm would allow audiences to comprehend the chang-ing nature of the industrial process, and the ills of capitalism At the forefront of this alternative agenda, red fl ag literally in hand,

appeared the Chaplin of Modern Times.29 The stakes on which Chaplin made his comedies were therefore high, and increasingly elevated by those both for and against him This would indeed

go on to become a very political life

Notes

1 ‘The Future of Charlie Chaplin’s Contribution’, Collier’s Weekly

[undated 1934/5], Churchill Archives Centre [CAC], Cambridge,

UK, Winston Churchill Papers [CHAR] 8/521.

2 Sinclair to Chaplin, 2 May 1941, Lilly Library, Bloomington, ana, USA [LLBI], Upton Sinclair Papers [UPS] My italics.

3 David Robinson, Chaplin: The Mirror of Opinion (London, 1983).

4 Buster Keaton, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (New York, 1960), 126.

5 Freud to Schiller, undated, within Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles [MHL], Harry Crocker Papers [HRC] f.12.

6 Kenney to Brooke- Wilkinson, 16 June 1939, National Archives, Kew, London, UK [TNA], Foreign and Commonwealth Offi ce Papers [FCO] 395/663.

7 For example, Eric L Flom, Chaplin in the Sound Era: An Analysis

of the Seven Talkies (London, 1997) and Colin Chambers, Here We Stand, Politics, Performers and Performance – Paul Robeson, Char- lie Chaplin and Isadora Duncan (London, 2006) utilise no archival

material.

8 Charles J Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of

a Star Image (London, 1989).

9 Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (London, 1975), passim and Kyp Harness, The Art of Charlie Chaplin: A Film- By-Film Analysis

Shap-and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (Oxford,

Hather-a new geogrHather-aphic frHather-amework.

14 Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930– 1960 (Berkeley, 1983).

15 Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler

(Cam-bridge, MA, 2013).

16 John Street, ‘Celebrity Politicians: Popular Culture and Political

Rep-resentation’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations,

6 (2004), 435– 52.

17 Kenneth S Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and His Times (London, 1998),

175– 6.

18 David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (London, 1992), 456, 458.

19 Peter Ackroyd, Charlie Chaplin (London, 2014).

20 A speech clipped by supportive voices in the press, e.g., Hoover Institute, Stanford University, California, USA [HOOV], Elizabeth Churchill Brown Papers [ECB] Box 18 Folder 13.

21 Burns to Hoover, 28 August 1922, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C., USA [FBI], FBI Chaplin Online fi le 7.

22 Harry Crocker’s unpublished memoir, ‘Charlie Chaplin: Man and Mime’, MHL/HRC, X– 12.

23 Assuming gross receipts of $2.5m, $6m and $5m respectively, with cost of entry at 20c, 25c and 50c As mentioned, this is likely an understatement given discounted 5c or 10c entry fees towards the end of such runs or at matinee showings.

24 Theodor W Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

In the mid-1930s a globally known fi gure began to pen an

account for the American magazine, Collier’s Weekly This

author was a regular contributor to the serial, writing on issues including press freedom and the future of publicity Yet on this occasion our narrator turned his hand to the undeniably trau-matic events of 9 May 1901:

In a room in St Thomas’s Hospital, London, a man lay dying

He had had a good life – a full life He had been a favourite

of the music halls He had tasted the triumphs of legitimate stage He had won a measure of fame as a singer His home life had been happy And now Death had come for him While he was yet in the prime of manhood, with success still sweet in his mouth, the curtain was falling – and forever The other windows of the hospital were dark In this one alone a light burned And below it, outside in the darkness, shivering with cold and numbed with fear, a child stood sobbing The dying man and the child outside the window both bore the same name – Charles Chaplin.1

Despite the dramatic, almost cinematic tone here, the author

of this retrospective was not Charlie Chaplin himself Nor was

it Alistair Cooke, Thomas Burke, Upton Sinclair or any of the other prominent literary and cultural commentators who often refl ected on the ‘meaning’ of Chaplin Instead, this piece of jour-nalism was written by Winston Churchill (see Figure 1.1) – at the time of publication marooned in the political wilderness before

Chaplin’s England

1

his stridently anti-Nazi oratory, and the actions of Hitler himself, brought this maverick hurtling back into favour in the eyes of his fellow countrymen.

Although they were politically dissimilar as we will see, Chaplin and Churchill always got on rather well Winston visited Charlie

on the set of what would become the 1931 fi lm City Lights, while

Figure 1.1 Numerous global politicians speculated on Chaplin’s

back-ground, including, here, Winston Churchill

Courtesy of the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, UK

Chaplin’s England 17

Charlie stayed at Chartwell when back in Britain promoting the same product Highlighting this connection from the outset is not merely to begin with some interesting trivia Instead the Chaplin–Churchill friendship suggests three important issues that will run throughout this book The fi rst is Chaplin’s political malleability Although broadly of the left, Chaplin was terribly interested in political ideas generally, and rather impressed by aristocratic fi gures

of the right The Astors – Lady Nancy and Viscount Waldorf (both Conservative MPs) – got on famously with Charlie, and were indic-ative of a series of relationships where Charlie provided the frisson

of fame and glamour, and such well-to-do couples the political table talk Certainly, politicians of whatever tribe were keen to glad hand this modern icon For example, presaging the modern obsession with the ‘selfi e’, Waldorf recorded in his 1926 diary that during a trip to Hollywood he was ‘photoed with [Charlie]

of course’.2 Perhaps this was no big deal But what was more intri guing – for a man of the left – was that during his 1931 promo-tional tour of the UK Charlie missed several engagements, includ-ing visiting the children then studying at his old school because,

as the left-leaning Daily Herald newspaper sardonically noted,

he was ‘detained at the Astors’.3 In February or March 1931 you were far more likely to fi nd Chaplin at the Prime Ministerial resi-dence of Chequers, or dining at the House of Commons, than in

a leftist discussion group, or dolling out the produce to real-life Little Tramps in a soup kitchen Throughout the book, as we will see, Charlie’s politics could be slippery His deeds did not always match his words

The second issue that the Churchill article suggests was the regularity in which politics intersected with Charlie’s life, particu-larly from those wishing to project a particular ‘meaning’ onto his childhood This occurred for good and ill When, in 1933, Chaplin was reported as saying he would make his next picture without his famous moustache for fear of invoking comparisons

with Hitler (a stance that would clearly be reversed by The Great Dictator in 1940), the Nazi press in Berlin responded that ‘the

creator and leader of the new Germany stands much too high to even hear the barking of a dog from London’s ghetto’.4 Chaplin’s origins were both mythologised by the man himself and by those desiring to talk him up or down But his entire life – involving as

it did such extraordinary highs and lows – was innately political, experiencing capitalism at both ends of the income scale from being reliant on the charity of Victorian Londoners to becoming one of the wealthiest men in America As such, it is impossible to

do Chaplin’s life justice by reference to the fi lm studio or the antics

in his bedroom alone The man lived a very political experience.The third theme, by no means a point limited to Churchill’s slightly overly dramatic prose, was just how ambiguous and shrouded in mystery Chaplin’s life actually was The later sex scandals, fl irtations with communism and manic personality we will get to, but public understanding of his origins – given how important they were to the man who would become the world’s most famous fi lmmaker – was perhaps the haziest of a rather hazy lot We may not expect a cheque-chasing piece of journalism from

a cash-strapped Winston Churchill to be strictly accurate in all the dotting of the i’s and crossing of the t’s, but the fact that his excerpt described Chaplin’s father’s ‘home life’ as ‘happy’, and that Churchill would go on to state that ‘his death brought a safe, comfortable world crashing about Charlie’ was certainly stretch-ing credulity, as this chapter will set out

Yet, if misleading, Churchill’s intentions were at least benign enough – something that could not always be said for those who speculated on Chaplin’s past Nazi references to Chaplin’s ‘ghetto’ background were just the tip of the iceberg Guesses as to Charlie’s allegedly ‘real’ name competed with one another to be the most stereotypically Jewish, while speculation on the location of his birth was an equally enjoyable parlour game for many in the press One 1935 article claimed that Charlie was the son of a Chaim Kaplan, a tailor from Whitechapel in London’s East End – then known for its signifi cant Jewish population.5 On the back of such tall tales both the FBI and British Special Branch would later inves-tigate allegations that he had been born Israel Thornstein, with either a German or Franco-Jewish background Another press account (from which both intelligence agencies seemed to have gathered much of their interest in Chaplin) accurately asserted that ‘accounts of his birth are as vague as those concerned with the nativity of divinities’, yet went on to report the second-hand gossip that ‘Charlie’s father was a French pantomimic clown, his mother

an English Jewess’.6 In Canada The Toronto Standard even carried

Chaplin’s England 19

a completely fabricated quote from Charlie that upon returning to London at the height of his fame, ‘I set out immediately to fi nd the house in which I was born, and when I reached the ghetto I saw the frightful loneliness and need of my brother Jews’.7 This was

wrong on many levels With The Great Dictator in pre-production

in the late 1930s this would reach something of a crescendo when pro-Nazi elements in the American press published a list of ‘Big Money Jewish Names’ that labelled Chaplin as a Jew originally named Tonstein.8 The story did not go away

All this was simply made up His father Charles Senior’s roots lay in Protestant Suffolk, England and, although stories of a mater-nal gypsy connection lingered, Charlie’s mother Hannah could trace her family tree through South London Yet, interestingly, the notion of a more ‘exotic’ heritage was a lie occasionally peddled by Charlie himself in early interviews There are a variety of possible explanations of this – Charlie may have done so either to embellish

or defl ect from the very real and tragic nature of his childhood His half-brother Sydney also had a Jewish father, and there was

no doubt an element of solidarity with someone he cared deeply about Charlie may just have been bored at the relentless grind

of publicity But it was also a legend able to gain some currency because, as one Special Branch letter put it, ‘although his claim to have been born in London on 16th April 1889 has been accepted

by the Passport Offi ce since at least 1920 we cannot fi nd ticulars of his birth at [record keeping facility] Somerset House’.9

par-Whoever Special Branch’s ‘source[,] which is usually considered fairly reliable’, actually was, it subsequently transpired that there was not a shred of evidence to back up his claim that Chaplin had been born in Fontainebleau or Melun in France either.10 Perhaps this informant had just read the papers and passed on the gossip

an edition of the music periodical The Magnet recorded that ‘on

the 15th ultimo, the wife of Mr Charles Chaplin, [was delivered]